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Probably hang- ing next to Fred Astaire's top hat and tails Neither of these Midwestern mas- ters of sophistication was born that way-and Astaire could play the part only on the stage and on the screen. Be- tween gigs, he remained a lifelong hay- seed, and so did an important part of Porter. Geniuses don't let anything go; they just add stuff As a mythical neighbor from Cole's home town, Peru (pro- nounced Pea-roo), Indiana, might put it, different folks have different ways of coping with the Big City. Porter's fellow- Hoosier Hoagy Carmichael, who had in real life been a university man, a law-school graduate, and a snappy dresser, elected to go the good- old-boy route, becoming more down home than he'd ever been back in Bloomington. But Porter preferred to beat the slickers at their own game, by being more Yale than Dink Stover, more New York than Eustace Tilley, and much more Parisian than Ernest Hemingway. "Don't Fence Me In" was absolutely genuine. Up to a point. R OLLING it all back to the beginning, one finds in McBrien's book an overpowering mother, who force-feeds her son on the arts, and a shadowy, withdrawn father. But the wrinkle is that it was Cole's father, Sam Porter, who had the artistic interests, including a passion for English Romantic poetry and an indeterminate skill on the guitar. The affable Sam left such matters as Cole's education entirely up to his wife, Kate, not necessarily from indifference but because it was really a question of deciding what schools his rich father- in -law, J. O. Cole, could be talked into paying for, and Sam had no say in this. Like her father, Kate Porter had noth- ing much to offer genetically, besides a blind drive to succeed, and if music was the way for her son to accomplish that, so be it. She would see to it that the kid was stuffed like a goose with piano and violin lessons. The regimen might have crushed a norma] child, but Cole thrived on -it. McBrien reports that, by the age of eight, Cole had bounced onto the stage of the local movie house and been bounced off again for playing inappro- priate music. And not long after that we find him committing the same offense THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 23, 1998 in a wet bathing suit on one of the local lake boats before escaping over the side into the water. In short, Cole's drive to show off was just as powerful as his grandfather's drive to make money, and his childhood was less like that of a hothouse plant than "Tom Sawyer" set to music. By the time Cole left Peru for board- ing school, he had become a veteran en- tertainer both at the cinema and on the lake boats. And he had discovered something else useful: friendship, which he would swiftly make into an art form. McBrien, in his most interesting pages, describes Cole's intense love for a ,girl named Desdemona Bearss, the first of several female friends who helped stabi- lize his life. Women as such were guar- anteed not to get too hot not to cool down, so he could indulge in the exotic pleasures of constancy with them. By the time he arrived at Yale, in 1909, all he needed was a piano and an audience, and he could invent his per- sonality as a mixture of mascot and court jester, Puck and Yorick, both sexes and none-a Michael Jackson for the carriage trade. And by linking the so- cials and theatricals at Yale with his own vaudeville circuit he could match his street-smart friend Irving Berlin song for song, even if the subjects were bull- dogs and Shakespeare. How far he still was from Broadway he learned when he took his stuff there, in a 1915 musical called "See America First," and it sank without a trace. But he had a target now and a mission in life. P ART of Cole never left Yale, and his door would always stay open to Old Elis, be they ever so boring, and to Peruvians, too, as if his art demanded that he keep in touch with dull people as well as bright ones. But it's hard to read his artistic intentions, because by the time he left Yale and had taken a music degree at Harvard he had ab- sorbed the first law of the Wasp gentle- man, which is never to be seen either working or crying. His life became a round of inscrutable frivolity, and when the First World War took him to Paris, in 1917, he behaved as though he'd been invited to a fancy-dress par His friend Monty Woolley said that Cole wore a different uniform every night as he hopped from group to group, looking for ways to stay in Paris. And it was there,